Walk down a wine aisle and the Pinots look like a family — Noir, Gris, Blanc, a different grape on every shelf. They are not a family. They are, mostly, a single grape that cannot stop mutating, caught at different moments in the act of changing its own colour.
Pinot Noir is among the oldest cultivated grapes, propagated by cuttings for something like nine centuries, and over that time it has proved unusually restless. Pinot Gris is what happens when a bud spontaneously mutates the genes that govern skin colour, turning the berry a greyish pink; Pinot Blanc is a further step along the same path, to white. Otherwise the plants are so alike that, vine for vine, they count as essentially one variety. On Femente that single lineage runs through more than 127,000 Pinot Noir wines and tens of thousands more sold as Gris or Blanc.
Pinot Meunier is the strangest of the group. It is a chimera: its outer layer of cells carries one mutation — the one that leaves its leaves dusted pale, as if with flour — while the cells underneath stay almost pure Pinot Noir. That quiet grape is one of the three pillars of Champagne, folded into more bottles than most drinkers realise, and Femente lists it in over 14,000 wines.
Champagne
One name on the list proves how loose the labelling is. Pinotage, South Africa's signature red, sounds like another sibling but is nothing of the kind: it was deliberately bred in 1925 by crossing Pinot Noir with the heat-tolerant Cinsaut, a genuinely new grape with two parents rather than a mutation of one. The most Pinot-sounding name turns out to be the only one that isn't really Pinot.
So 'Pinot' on a label is less a family name than a record of one vine's wandering genetics. It even travels in disguise: the Pinot Grigio crowding wine lists is simply Pinot Gris under an Italian name. The grape barely changes; the words we hang on it do most of the work.
